the island looking for a doctor. The time he’d scooped her up with the intention of carrying her upstairs, but because of his bad back ended up making love to her on the landing. The time she’d woken up from knee surgery to find a smiley face drawn on the bandage around her leg.
Could the man who still, almost twenty years into their marriage, left notes on her coffee cup with an actual heart with their initials inside really be the same man who’d downloaded that movie onto his computer?
Claire looked down at the broken racket. So much money, and the sad truth was that she really preferred a sixty-dollar Wilson.
Back when she and Paul were students, they always made lists when they couldn’t figure out what to do. Paul would get a ruler and draw a line down the center of the page. On one side they would list reasons they should do something, buy something, try something, and on the other side they would write the reasons not to.
Claire pulled herself up to standing. She tossed the racket onto the Porsche’s hood. Paul kept a notepad and pen on his workbench. She drew a line down the center of a blank page. Paul would’ve broken out into a sweat over that line. It veered to the left toward the bottom. The pen had skipped off the page, curling up the edge.
Claire tapped the pen on the side of the bench. She stared at the two empty columns. There were no pros and cons. This list was for questions and answers.
The first question was: Had Paul really downloaded the movie? Claire had to assume that he had. Accidentally downloading files with viruses and spyware was Claire’s thing. Paul was too careful to accidentally download anything. And if by some off chance he had downloaded the movie by mistake, he would’ve deleted the file rather than storing it in his Work folder. And he would’ve told Claire about it, because that’s the kind of relationship they had.
Or at least it was the kind of relationship she’d thought they’d had.
She wrote the word “Accident?” in one column and “No” in the other.
Claire started tapping the pen again. Could it be that Paul had downloaded the movie for the sado-masochism, then not realized until he got to the end that it was more than that?
She shook her head. Paul was so straitlaced that he tucked his undershirt into his boxers before he went to bed at night. If someone had told her last week that her husband was into SM, after she choked down her laughter, Claire would have assumed that Paul would be a bottom. Not that he was passive in their sex life. Claire was the one more likely to just lie there. But sexual fantasies were projections of opposites. Paul was in control all of the time, so his fantasy would be to let someone else take over. Claire certainly had daydreams about being tied up and ravished by a stranger, but in the cold light of day, that sort of thing was terrifying.
And besides that, a few years ago when she’d read Paul several passages from Fifty Shades of Grey, they’d both giggled like teenagers.
“The biggest fantasy in that book,” Paul had said, “is that he changes for her in the end.”
Claire had never thought of herself as an expert in male behavior, but Paul had a point, and not just about men. People did not change their basic, core personalities. Their values tended to stay the same. Their personal demeanors. Their world outlook and political beliefs. One need only go to a high school reunion to verify the theory.
So, going by this, it made no sense that the man who had cried when their cat had to be put down, who refused to watch scary movies, who joked that Claire was on her own if an ax murderer ever broke into the house, would be the same man who derived sexual pleasure from watching horrible, unspeakable acts.
Claire looked down at the notepad. She wrote, “More files?” Because that was the dark thought lurking in the back of her mind. The file name had been a series of numbers, and all of the files she’d seen in the Work folder were similarly numbered. Had Paul downloaded more of these disgusting movies? Was that how he spent his time when he told Claire he’d be working late in his office?
She wasn’t a Pollyanna about these things. She knew men